Twain provides a nice description of the boom times in Virginia City, the days of the Comstock Lode. He is now a reporter on the staff of the Enterprise and enjoys a friendly rivalry with Boggs of the Union.
Reading Date
May 23, 2011
SL Venue
The Deck
Twain Chapter Comments
Regarding Cornish Beer Drinkers
There has been a conversation on the Twain-L listserve regarding an article published in Buffalo about Texas Steer that may or may not have been penned by Mark Twain. Barbara Schmidt has noted some similarity to Twain's writings that has some bearing on the population of Virginia City at the time of Twain's residency. From her email:
3) One curious angle that I found when I looked at _Mark Twain's Lexicon_
for the word "corned" in quotation marks -- The documented usage according
to the _Lexicon_ was in the 1910 edition of _Mark Twain's Speeches_ in a
speech titled "The Union Right or Wrong? Reminiscences of Nevada." That
1910 version of the speech contains a passage: "We found him standing on a
table in a saloon with an old tin lantern in one had and the school report
in the other, haranguing a gang of "corned" miners ..." (_Speeches_, 1910,
p. 272 -- available in the Oxford Edition, 1996). Searching for that
identical phrase turns up an edited version that was used in _Roughing It_,
Chapter 43. However, the passage had been edited to read: "haranguing a
gang of intoxicated Cornish miners..." (_Roughing It_ University of
California Works edition, 1993, p. 280). There is no textual commentary
regarding this change or how it appeared in the original manuscript, if it
exists.
I think a good argument can be made that Twain did use the phrase "corned"
at least once in his notes and that it was later edited and/or refined in
such a way to implicate Cornish miners -- who may not have even been
Cornish.
Barb